Adiamante Quotes

“Power cannot be maintained and effectively exercised without a moral structure accepted and practiced by all because power attracts the corruptible and because corruption destroys consensus.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“You didn’t ask us about whether it was safe to take your troops out of the locial. You told us that was what you were doing. Your assumption was that Old Earth is perfectly safe unless you’re warned. Is deep space safe? Would you drop into the sun’s photosphere because no one warned you it would incinerate you? Nothing is perfectly safe. We don’t provide warning signs to protect you from yourselves. Try to remember that.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“It’s civilized to let a society overbreed and destroy the ecology, raise interpersonal tensions to the point that violence is endemic, and stretch resources to the point that all too many children are ill-fed, uneducated, diseased, and without any hope of ever reaching their potential? Or would you prefer millions of abortions? That happened, you know, before the chaos. But it’s barbaric to require people to limit their offspring?”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Think about the adiamante.” I was too tired to say much more. “It says more than I can.” And it did—the hardest manmade substance, and it couldn’t stand up to the souls of human beings.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“It dates to antiquity, and it’s called the Iron Law of Responsibility. Those with great power must exercise equally great responsibility.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“I took the stairs two at a time. There’s a time for decorum and a time to run like a crazed vorpal’s after you, except a crazed vorpal’s an oxymoron. This was the time to run.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“No tyranny is so oppressive as a society truly based on innate ability,”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Your compatriots don’t want to believe you—or me. It’s something like, ‘Don’t disturb my convictions with your facts.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“I doubted that everyone would heed the evacuation request. We didn’t command, even in matters of life and death, and there are always those people who know better.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“As usual, they’d missed the point, almost as if on purpose.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“I’d have felt better with Morgen to talk to, to help, but all I had was memory and a soulsong to help me with our ancient cousins from across the stars, cousins so willful they could not see. Cousins even more willful than the ancient heroes my mother had bequeathed to me.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Unthinking aggression was genetically positive for clawing humanity to the top of the ecological totem pole, except that it ended up destroying that totem pole. With high technology, strike-first aggression proved unworkable.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Heroes, they don’t grow old, and they don’t grow smart, and we’ve had enough of them, and I bid you all good day.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Each hero had a tale, of the old days, and of how he had routed and killed, and set things to right, sometimes to right the right that the hero before him had righted.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“I try to be honest, and honesty is frowned on in most cultures because it’s too hard on people’s egos, and that creates tensions that most societies cannot handle.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“It’s hard to fight danger if you don’t grow up to recognize it.” And besides, we weren’t about to give up Old Earth to the predators. “As I said, and, as no one heard, we won’t coddle stupidity among ourselves.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Some people are stupid. We don’t regulate stupidity. You protect it, and it breeds.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“The concentrate tasted like acidified mud, except mud tasted better because it was buffered.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Of course, the system depends on honesty, but in the end, any system does, and we just threw out those who proved they were dishonest. Surprising what that does for honesty.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“The problem with having currency is that any society that controls it eventually debases it and taxes it. Any society that doesn’t control it will still have it evolve, and then the currency becomes pegged to outside influences—like the scarcity of precious metals, colored seashells, or large circular rocks with holes in the middle.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“Not many of the ancient Greeks or Mohammedans had survived the Chaos Years, when no one cared how many different ways they killed each other or what they did to water and food supplies.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“We developed a philosophical credo and applied it consistently. We accept that morality, power, and consensus are the underpinnings for any society and work to maintain all three in balance. Trust and mutual respect are, in a way, the mortar that hold the other three together.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“She smiled charmingly, the way I wished I could, and I could tell she didn’t like Kemra at all.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“I forced a smile. “Is there anything else you need?” “Your head …” That was subvocalized, and I ignored it.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“In the end, only what each of us could hold endured, and only while we endured.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“I didn’t want to hear his lecture about how the ancients had actually sweetened and flavored synthetic rubber and chewed it. Chewing the same stuff that you put on groundcar tires?”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“There are several dozen storerooms with enough dried and sealed food to feed a fleet for a decade, if you want to call fortified and enriched sawdust dating from five millennia back ‘food.’” “It’s still nourishing?” “The ancients were good at preserving just about anything, except taste and themselves.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“despite all the growth in abilities, basic human emotions never changed. The bottom line was always force. The problem facing me was that the cybs didn’t seem to recognize the difference between force and violence.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“the growth of documents generally reflects the lack of trust in a society. No paper trail can make someone accountable. Only self-assumption can. Too many societies had used paper as a substitute for accountability.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante

“life wasn’t yes-no, on-off. Life was shades of gray, and rainbows not in the order of the spectrum. Our bodies have always known more than our minds have acknowledged they knew.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., Adiamante